This article aims at providing an overview of the current state of development of Semantic Web services technology. The focus is on a comparison between the research held in the academia and the Semantic Web services adoption in the industry. The reasons that hamper the application of this technology are also given.

Semantic Web Services Applications – a Reality Check

AEMOS is an agent mediated e-commerce platform, which provides ontology-based services enabling a meaningful communication between agents, even when they use different ontologies. This system also includes a support component based on emergent social networks, which allows improving the system's performance by enhancing the ontology-based services. In this paper, our goal is to improve the system's performance, reducing the amount of failed negotiation, by enabling agents to evaluate the likelihood of reaching an agreement with a proposed partner, allowing them to focus in negotiations which may actually lead to satisfactory deals. For that, we propose exploring further the relations which emerge between agents as they interact with each other. More specifically, we propose improving AEMOS's e-commerce model, by adding social network based support in the selection of potential negotiation partners as well as in the formulation and evaluation of proposals.

Exploring Emergent Social Networks to Improve Agent Mediated E-Commerce

CREDIBILIDADE E REPUTAÇÃO EM AGENTES INTELIGENTES Aplicação ao comércio electrónico

AEMOS is a simulator which aims to support the development of agent-based electronic markets capable of dealing with the natural semantic heterogeneity existent in this kind of environment. AEMOS simulates a marketplace which provides ontology matching services, enhanced with the exploitation of emergent social networks, enabling an efficient and transparent communication between agents, even when they use different ontologies. The system recommends possible alignments between the agents' ontologies, and lets them negotiate and decide which alignment should be used to translate the exchanged messages. In this paper we propose a new ontology alignment negotiation process, which promotes the reutilisation and combination of already existing alignments, as well as the involvement of business agents in the alignment composition process. With this new model, we aim to achieve a higher adequacy of the used alignments, as well as a more accurate and trustful evaluation of the alignments.

An agent-based electronic market simulator enhanced with ontology matching services and emergent social networks

Exploring the Effect of Negotiation on UNCLOS

Negotiation plays an important role for the success of e-commerce, while agent-based negotiation is a new trend. This paper summarizes and analyzes the key concepts and techniques in agent-based negotiation in e-commerce with a particular emphasis on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) aspects. Future directions are pointed out, and potential impediments to the wide adoption of agent-based negotiation in e-commerce are highlighted.

Agent-based negotiation in e-commerce: state of the art

How cognitive issue bracketing affects interdependent decision-making in negotiations

Conflict management scholars study mixed-motive negotiation situations with cooperative and competitive incentives predominantly through multi-issue negotiation tasks in experimental studies. Intriguingly, experimenters currently lack an objective, generalizable, and continuous measure that precisely quantifies the incentives underlying these negotiation tasks. We present the conflict strength coefficient, which enables scholars to systematically quantify the incentive structures in these multi-issue negotiation tasks. By making the incentive structures accessible and numerically comparable, the conflict strength coefficient provides new insights into the central element of the experimental study of negotiation and conflict management, unmasks differences across existing tasks, facilitates research transparency, knowledge sharing, and open science practices. We demonstrate the coefficient’s benefits by providing a hands-on example from past research, by reviewing and quantitatively assessing the current literature, and by mapping conflict strength coefficients for the negotiation and conflict management research landscape and its subareas. Our analysis suggests that the conflict strength coefficient can enrich the understanding of cooperative and competitive incentives in the established tasks and directly guide and support an individual scholar’s process of knowledge creation. The conflict strength coefficient provides a methodological contribution to the experimental study of conflict management and negotiation with immediate benefits for the production of scientific knowledge, the experimental study of real-world phenomena, and theory development.

Hong Zhang

Papers

Agent-based negotiation in e-commerce: state of the art

How cognitive issue bracketing affects interdependent decision-making in negotiations

Conflict Strength: Measuring the Tension Between Cooperative and Competitive Incentives in Experimental Negotiation Tasks